Forgive my absence here yesterday, dear reader, but it was simply too goddamn hot to write.  It was 107°F in The Creek yesterday, which is really too hot to do much of anything that requires any sort of mental clarity.  But never mind all that.  Today is a new day, and what a day it is.

July 12th should be a national holiday for anyone tired of sucking on the exhaust pipe of a world powered by conformity and crushing mediocrity.  This is the birthday of Henry David Thoreau – poet, philosopher, professional recluse, and mad prophet of the woods.  Born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau did more than carve his name onto the bark of American letters.  He set the whole goddamn tree on fire.

This is the man who walked away from the mechanical insanity of the 19th century to shack up in the woods near a pond, chopping his own firewood and minding his own business, only to emerge with Walden, a book so sharp and provocative it’s still noosed around the neck of English majors over a century later.  It’s not a polite book.  It doesn’t coddle you or ask for permission to be heard.  No, Walden is a defiant roar against the drivel of materialism, a full-frontal challenge to the hamster wheel of ambition and blind conformity.  Thoreau grabs us by the collar and demands we live simply and insists that we shed all the junk cluttering our lives and figure out what the hell it even means to live.

And if that wasn’t enough to piss off polite society, he doubled down with Civil Disobedience.  Written after Thoreau himself spent a night in jail for refusing to pay taxes to a government he deemed morally bankrupt (yes, the night in jail is an essential flex), this essay is nothing less than a flamethrower aimed at unjust authority.  Governments, he argued, exist to serve justice – not to prop up the petty tyrannies of the many or the corrupt whims of the few.  And when they fail?  Dissent isn’t just a right, it’s an obligation.

This is where Thoreau’s buckshot really hit the mark.  The ripples of his defiance carried far.

Gandhi mined Civil Disobedience to mount a nonviolent rebellion and kick the British Empire out of India, an achievement that still reverberates in history books and imperial nightmares.  Martin Luther King Jr. marched into the Civil Rights Movement with Thoreau’s words tucked into his back pocket, turning quiet disobedience into a wrecking ball against systemic oppression.  Think about that for a second – one guy, dollar-store journal in hand, wielding an influence so massive it could topple empires and rewrite history.

Thoreau didn’t write for fame – honestly, he would’ve rather burned most of us with a caustic one-liner than shake hands and schmooze at some literary soirée.  He wrote because the words were searing in his guy and demanded to be spit out, pure and undiluted.  His legacy?  It’s a challenge, flashing like a neon sign for misfits, the world-shakers, the ones who grind their teeth at the idea of “business as usual.”

Sure, the man got misunderstood.  Some called him misanthropic, others accused him of hypocrisy.  But Thoreau never pretended to be a saint.  He was furious, flawed, and human.  He philosophized about freedom, sure, but he also lived it, inhaled it, and scribbled it into permanence.

So today, on his birthday, throw up a toast to Thoreau.  Better yet, unplug for a couple minutes.  Forget the relentless scrolling, the email pings, the fluorescent-lit conveyor belt of modern living.  Step outside, breathe, touch grass, think, be.  Raise your middle finger to all the bullshit masquerading as progress.  That’s your present to man who lived deliberately, resisted relentlessly, and died unapologetically.

Happy Birthday, Uncle Hank…the rebel spirit lives on.

N.P.: “Smoke On The Water” – Calling All Astronauts

This Wednesday is for the more dark and twisted dear readers, for today is July 9, a date that seems to have been plucked from the blackened pages of some cosmic ledger, a day when the literary gods decided to birth their most deliciously deranged and shadow-dwelling progeny.  If you’re the sort of person who finds comfort in the flicker of a guttering candle and the whisper of something unspeakable just beyond the edge of the firelight, then this day is your holy feast.  Let’s raise a glass – hell, let’s raise the whole goddamn bottle – to three architects of the macabre who share this date as their entry point into the mortal coil.

First up, Ann Radcliffe, born in 1764, the original queen of Gothic fiction.  Before her, novels were polite little things, like tea parties with too much sugar and not enough gin.  But Radcliffe?  She dragged the genre into the shadows, draped it in cobwebs, and gave it a pulse that throbbed with dread.  The Mysteries of Udolpho was a blueprint for how to make readers sweat through their corsets.  She is The Voice for the whole haunted castles and moonlit moors crowd, of which I am proudly a member.  Without her, there’s no Poe, no Austen parodying her in Northanger Abbey, and certainly no modern horror as we know it.  She’s the reason you can’t walk past a crumbling mansion without imagining a ghostly figure in the window.  Cheers to you, Ann, you magnificent purveyor of dread.

Then there’s Matthew “Monk” Lewis, born in 1775, who took Radcliffe’s Gothic playbook, soaked it in absinthe, and set it on fire.  At 19 – an age when most of us were still figuring out how to fake our way through adulthood – he wrote The Monk, a book so scandalous it made Victorian prudes clutch their pearls and faint dead away.  Erotic, violent, blasphemous – it was the literary equivalent of a mosh pit in a cathedral.  Lewis obliterated boundaries with a sledgehammer.  He gave us depraved monks, demonic pacts, and enough moral ambiguity to make your head spin.  If Radcliffe was the architect of Gothic romance, Lewis was the punk rock anarchist who spray-painted obscenities on it’s walls.  Here’s to you, Matt – you magnificent, twisted bastard.

And finally, we land in 1945, the year Dean Koontz entered the scene.  Now Koontz might not be Gothic in the traditional sense, but let’s not split hairs while we’re three drinks deep.  The man has churned out more novels than most of us have had coherent thoughts, and his knack for blending suspense, horror, and a touch of the supernatural has made him a household name.  Odd Thomas, False Memory, and Phantoms are like rollercoasters in the dark: thrilling, disorienting, and just scary enough to make you question your life choices.  Koontz is the guy who reminds us that the monsters under the bed are real, but they’re probably just misunderstood.  Dean, you’re a machine, and we’re all just trying to keep up.

So here’s to July 9, a day that gave us three titans of the dark and the strange.  Radcliffe, Lewis, Koontz – each one a master of their own brand of literary mayhem.  If you’re not raising a glass to them today, you’re doing it wrong.  And if you’re not reading their work, you might as well be dead already.

N.P.: “KOOKSEVERYWHERE!!!” – AWOLNATION

Happy Tuesday, dear reader.  Today, we celebrate Hemingway’s baptism by shrapnel and the birth of a literary demi-god.

Picture this: it’s July 8, 1918, and an eighteen-year-old kid – not some grizzled veteran, not some stoic Roman statue carved by hardship, but a pimply, wet-behind-the-ears, not-yet-bearded version of Ernest Hemingway – is bumbling around Italy, driving ambulances for the Red Cross like some overeager Small Town Hero.  And then, boom!  Cue the Austrian mortar, a nasty piece of work that comes screaming in from afar like the wrath of God, raining shrapnel down on Hemingway’s youthful, squishy human form with all the subtlety of a freight train colliding with a fruit cart.  Over 200 fragments of metal embed themselves in his leg – not one, not a dozen, but 200, like some gratuitously overblown war souvenir he didn’t ask for.

But wait, it gets worse (or better, depending on whether you’re Hemingway or a future literary voyeur eager to psychoanalyze the trauma stew that would become his writing).  While he’s lying there, freshly perforated, our boy still has the nerve to drag an injured Italian soldier to safety because, apparently, even with half your leg turned into modern art, you can’t turn off the hero complex.  For this, he earns an Italian Silver Medal of Military Valor and a permanent VIP membership to the Survivors of Insane Shit Club.

Fast-forward to the aftermath, where Hemingway is convalescing in a Milan hospital, which is, in many ways, the haunting prologue to a novel you’ve already read.  Because it’s here, amidst the gauze and blood stains, he collides headfirst into actual romance – and by romance, I mean Agnes von Kurowsky, a no-nonsense nurse with enough poise to inspire Catherine Barkley, Hemingway’s star-crossed muse in A Farewell to Arms.  There’s something almost too well-scripted about it, like God’s editor handed Hemingway the perfect character arc for his fledgling authorial ambitions.

But here’s the kicker – it’s this exact sequence of war-monster violence and gooey human connection that calcifies into Hemingway’s whole literary thing.  If you’ve wondered why his prose reads like a direct line to the soul of struggle, the battle scars are the handwritten footnotes.  His stories don’t coddle or cajole; they slap you across the face with raw, unvarnished truth – that life is brutal and short, and yet, somehow, worth chasing even when despair has you by the throat.  The bleak endurance of The Old Man and the Sea, the grit-covered tenderness of For Whom the Bell Tolls – you don’t pull that kind of emotional theory out of thin air.  You write that because you’ve crawled through the mud and the blood and came out alive but not unscathed.

It’s almost poetic, really, that Hemingway would limp away from Italy with wounds that would heal wrong in all the right ways.  Those 200 fragments were more than just metal in his leg; they were ideas welded into the marrow of his bones.  By the time he scooped up the Nobel Prize in 1954, it was less a victory lap than an expectation fulfilled.  We knew, deep down, that no one could write about the weight of human suffering with such stark, battered honesty unless they’d once been shattered themselves.

And so, we’re left with the immense irony that Hemingway, the legendary tough guy of 20th-century literature, probably wouldn’t have become Hemingway without that mortar blast derailing his teenage innocence.  Funny how the universe hands you trauma like a baton and says, “Run with it.”

N.P.: “Venus” – Royal Republic

Today we pour some out for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes, who passed away on July 7, 1930 at the age of 71.  His death marked the end of a prolific career that not only gave us one of the most iconic literary characters but also contributed significantly to the detective fiction genre.  Doyle’s last words, spoken to his wife, were reportedly, “You are wonderful.”

There’s something unreasonably grand about the way Sir Arthur Conan Doyle shuffled off this mortal coil.  Those final words – “You are wonderful,” whispered to his wife – are hardly the stuff of mundane, fading-out inertia.  They leave you imagining some kind of Victorian fireworks display framing his departure, ornate letters spelling out his bow in curling smoke.  It’s almost too perfect.  Too wrapped in velvet and dipped in sepia-toned drama to feel real.  But what could be more fitting for the man who, through some strange alchemy of character engineering and narrative bravado, birthed Sherlock Holmes, a figure so steadfast in the collective imagination he might as well be carved into Mount Rushmore next to the guy with the top hat?

As mentioned above, the man died on July 7, 1930, at the age of 71, presumably exhausted from a career spent revolutionizing detective while moonlighting as history’s most confounding paradox.  Here’s a guy who gave the world Sherlock Holmes – deductive reasoning incarnate – only to spend a solid chunk of his later years chasing ghosts, spouting spiritualist woo-woo, and attempting, with alarming sincerity, to convince the public that fairies were real.  Real fairies.  With wings and everything.  It’s the kind of creative dissonance that makes you wonder if genius simply always comes with a side order of lunacy.  A complex combo meal for the mind.

But Doyle’s death was like turning off a spotlight, leaving the stage dark while the velvet curtains swayed and creaked in some unseen draft.  No encore, no standing ovation.  Except, of course, that we’re still clapping.  We’re clapping every time someone reaches for The Hound of the Baskervilles on a crowded airport bookshelf or binge-watches the latest adaptation of a Holmes story that Doyle himself probably would’ve rolled his eyes at.  And for what it’s worth, the adaptations do keep coming.  Hundreds of them.  The character has been dissected, reset, gender-swapped, modernized, de-modernized, and even turned into a vaguely anthropomorphic mouse detective – none of which has diminished his relevance.  Even when Holmes appears as a snarky sociopath who plays the violin like he’s trying to strangle Mozart’s ghost, he remains weirdly eternal.

It’s a hell of a legacy for a guy who, by all accounts, got bored of the character halfway through writing him.  There’s an irony there, dear reader, is there not?  Doyle’s genius wasn’t in his ability to adore Holmes, but in his ability to construct him so well that the rest of us can’t stop adoring him for him.  It’s like building a ship you hate, only to realize it’s the sturdiest thing afloat, indestructible even when it’s battered around by the gales of pop culture.  Doyle himself tried to sink it – drowning Holmes in the icy chasm of Reichenbach Falls.  But good luck holding down something that millions of readers are collectively begging to resurrect.  Like Lazarus in a deerstalker hat, Holmes returned, and, to Doyle’s resigned irritation, never left.

But Doyle’s contributions didn’t stop there.  At a time when the detective story was still flailing about in its infancy like a drunk looking for their keys, he took it by the scruff of its neck and told it to shape up.  The genre had existed before Doyle – Poe’s Dupin waddled so Holmes could strike with brisk efficiency – but Doyle sharpened it down to a fine point.  He gave detective fiction its rigor, its bit, and, most importantly, its enduring sense of clever possibility.  He’s the reason we can believe – against all evidence to the contrary – that any puzzle, no matter how tangled, can be solved with enough brainpower and an alarming tolerance for pipe smoke.

And yet, Doyle somehow managed to life his life as if entirely unconcerned by what he was doing to the literary world.  He wrote feverishly, yes, but his focus was broader, more scattered, like a flashlight with a weak battery.  He dabbled in just about everything -writing historical novels, dabbling in politics, obsessing over paranormal nonsense.  It’s almost as though he didn’t quite realize he was in the middle of creating a cultural giant.  Or maybe, in true contrarian fashion, he simply didn’t give a shit.

Now here we are, nearly a century after his death, still tangled in the web of his imagination, still arguing about which Sherlock actor captured the “true” Holmes, still swearing that we’d totally outwit Moriarty if given the chance.  Doyle may have stepped away from the stage, but the play – thank God for it – goes on, loud and puzzling and impossible to put down.  His legacy is a testament to the peculiar power of storytelling – something that can outlast even the stories’ creator.  If that’s not a kind of immortality, then I don’t know what is.

N.P.: “The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum – Signals MIX” – Collide

Two hundred and forty-nine years ago, a scrappy band of colonial misfits decided they’d had absolutely enough of powdered wigs and imperial bootlicking.  July 4, 1776 was more than just a date on their calendar…it was a detonation.  The Declaration of Independence, that feral, ink-stained manifesto of rebellion, was adopted, and the world hasn’t been the same since.

I always taught The Declaration in my composition classes, introducing it as the most punk-rock document every written in the English language, and I managed to break through to even the most jaded, cynical minds in the class.  This wasn’t, after all, some polite memo to King George III.  This wasn’t some bitchy, ineffective hashtag campaign.  Fuck no.  This was a cannonball of words fired across the Atlantic.  Jefferson and his crew composed a symphony of defiance, a literary Fuck You to tyranny.  “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” – those words roar with rebellion against royal oppression.  They’re the kind of words that make you want to grab a musket, ignite a rocket, and scream “Not today, you pathetic, pusillanimous, powdered ponce.”  It was the first and only No Kings Protest, with the first patriots declaring war on an actual king, not some half-assed gathering of effete old ladies in strip-parking lots whining pointlessly to each other because they are afraid of actual American exceptionalism and dominance.

And here we are, centuries later, still riding the shockwaves of that declaration.  The United States of America – flawed, messy, loud, and unapologetically free.  Sure, we’ve stumbled.  We just spent four nightmarish years being sucker-punched by corruption, dragged through the mud by cowards, and gaslit by those who’d rather see us kneel than stand.  Fuck those anti-American cretins.  Most of us haven’t forgotten: our national anthem literally has explosions in it.  Rockets.  Bombs.  The whole damn thing is a pyrotechnic ode to resilience.  The country isn’t perfect, and it never will be.  But perfection was never the point.  The point was the Fight – the relentless, unyielding pursuit of something better.  That’s what July 4th is about.  It’s not just a day for hot dogs and sparklers (though, let’s be honest, those are non-negotiable).  It’s a day to remember that freedom isn’t free, and it sure as hell isn’t quiet.  It’s loud, messy, and sometimes downright chaotic.  But it’s ours.

So, fire up the grill.  Crack a beer, open the Jack.  Set off a firework or twenty.  And remember: this day isn’t just about celebrating what we’ve done – it’s about gearing up for what’s next.  Because the pursuit of happiness?  That’s a full-contact blood sport.

Happy Independence Day, America.  Stay wild.  Stay free.  And never stop roaring.

Now onto some patriotic D.P.S. business.  Fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was adopted, July 4, 1826, America bore witness to what could only be described as history’s most ironic curtain call.  Thomas Jefferson and John Adams – framed in the annals of American lore as two intellectual giants of the Revolution – both passed away within hours of each other. Sure, life and death are full of coincidences, but c’mon…this?  The two men who helped craft the document that declared freedom to a British monarch both bowing out in its golden jubilee?  That’s a plot twist even Hollywood wouldn’t dare.

It’s difficult not to see their dual exits as some sort of cosmic mic-drop.  After all, they were perhaps the two most consequential of the founding fathers.  Adams, the pugnacious, fiery advocate, weaponized words like a Revolutionary Rambo, his essays and speeches rallying colonists with unapologetic vigor.  And then there was Jefferson, whose pen seemed to channel the muses themselves.  His prose in the Declaration – the lofty, idealistic call for unalienable rights – set hearts ablaze while encapsulating the philosophical heartbeat of the Revolution.  Together, they were the Lennon and McCartney of liberty (minus the questionable haircuts).

But here’s the kicker that makes their partnership even richer – they could not have been more different.  Adams was blunt and quick to argue, a man who saw no point in sugarcoating his points.  Jefferson, on the other hand, was measured, deliberate, and notoriously reserved.  While they clashed and feuded (I’m looking at you, Election of 1800, with your spicy, scorched-earth smear campaigns), they eventually reconciled late in life, exchanging letters that mapped out their shared reflections and rivalries.  It was the bromance nobody saw coming.

Then came July 4, 1826 – like a cosmic endnote to their lives and legacies.  Adams, in his final moments, reportedly murmured, “Jefferson survives.”  Except Jefferson didn’t.  He had passed away just hours earlier at Monticello.  Was this last thought a poetic tribute, or a sly dig at their lifelong rivalry?  We’ll never know, but it’s wonderfully on-brand for the man.

Despite their flaws, their legacy endures.  The Declaration of Independence remains not just a historical document but a bold, aspirational blueprint for justice and freedom.  And on that fateful summer day in 1826, it was as if the universe pressed pause to give these architects of the American experiment their due – brilliant, flawed, and forever revolutionary.

On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau packed his philosophical musings, an unreasonably high tolerance for mosquitos, and (presumably) a decent stash of snacks, and moved to a cabin near Walden Pond.  It wasn’t exactly rugged wilderness – his buddy Ralph Waldo Emerson owned the land – but Thoreau wasn’t aiming for “off-the-grid mountain man.”  This was an experiment, a declaration of independence from knick-knack-filled parlors, neighborly dramas, and what he called the “quiet desperation” of 19th-century life.

The result?  The iconically unhinged “Walden,” part memoir, part manifesto, and entirely a literary smackdown of materialism and societal conformity.  More than just rejecting cluttered closets – he was throwing shade at the very foundations of comfort culture.  Why do humans labor endlessly for stuff they don’t even need?  Why not build a tiny shack (in Emerson’s metaphorical backyard, if you’re lucky enough) and live deliberately?  Walden asks the questions you might ponder while doom-scrolling Amazon listings at 3am.

Self-reliance is the drumbeat of the book, and Thoreau hammered on it with unrelenting confidence.  He chopped wood, grew beans, and arguably did more for the public image of solitude than centuries of hermits combined.  But don’t be fooled by the pastoral vibes – it wasn’t all feel-good “main-character energy” at Walden Pond.  A crucial part of Thoreau’s philosophy was resisting the machine, metaphorically and literally.  His critiques of conformity were a rally cry of individualism and rebellion, two concepts in sore need of renewed attention these days.

And here’s the kicker in that direction – “Walden” doesn’t sit neatly in its 19th-century time capsule.  Over two centuries later, it still shouts from the bookshelves at anyone trying to KonMari their lives or ditch “The Man.”  Thoreau’s treatise on minimalism, nature, and resisting societal nonsense resonates with present day freedom fighters at war with cancel culture, speech codes and pronoun abuse, moronic mask-mandates, government-mandated untested vaccines, and the rest of such anti-American bullshit.  Sure, not everyone’s sprinting to build cabins in the woods, but his message of intentional living?  That’s hitting home, whether you’re in a trendy city loft or your studio backdrop happens to be a perfectly manicured farm on Instagram.

Thoreau declared a personal revolution that July 4th – a one-man independence celebration complete with philosophical fireworks.  His legacy endures not because he nailed the tiny-house aesthetic, but because he challenged his readers to define their lives in a way that was Revolutionary with a capital “R.”

Lastly (though certainly not leastly), on July 4, 1855, Walt Whitman took the literary equivalent of a sledgehammer to the buttoned-up cultural norms of his time and published Leaves of Grass.  It was a full-throated yawp – a deeply democratic, unapologetically sensual celebration of the self, the body, and the soul.

Imagine being a Victorian prude (this won’t be hard for some of you) confronted with this book.  Whitman’s verses were an unaccompanied walk straight into the underbelly of humanity’s desires and contradictions – raw, radical, and drenched in the sweat of a working man’s labor.  He painted a world where the farmer, the legal immigrant, and the mechanic weren’t just background characters but leading actors in the grand theater of democracy.  And his free verse?  It swaggered.  No formal structure, no rigid rhyme schemes – just the rhythm of Whitman’s heart beating unapologetically across the page.

Leaves of Grass didn’t just talk the talk of American independence; it strutted its way into the room, dropped the mic, and winked at the audience.  Whitman’s themes of individuality and unity were inseparable.  He blurred lines between bodies, classes, and even the sacred and profane – arguing that everything and everyone holds divine potential.  It was a throat-punch to the suffocating buttoned-up culture of the era.

And let’s not overlook the audacity of publishing it on Independence Day.  Whitman practically gift-wrapped this literary rebellion and tied it up with a star-spangled bow, shouting, “This is America!”  It was the ultimate power move, a nod to a nation still grappling with its ideals and contradictions, and a promise of what it could become.

Critics were…not thrilled (no shit, right?).  But over time, Leaves of Grass grew into a towering monument of American literature, shaping modern poetry and influencing everyone from Langston Hughes to Allen Ginsberg.  Whitman infused his work with democracy’s messy, joyful, radical spirit.  Today, we can look back and marvel at Whitman’s chutzpah.  He wrote poetry that didn’t tiptoe around convention but stomped all over it with muddy boots.  And in doing so, he gave us verses still capable of making hearts skip beats and reminding us – regardless of how messy, complex, or chaotic life gets – that we contain multitudes.

N.P.: “American Badass” – Kid Rock

Gather ’round, dear readers and existential thrill-seekers, because today we light the candles on a metaphorical cake that will never be eaten, in honor of a man who gave us nightmares we didn’t know we needed.  On July 3, 1883, Franz Kafka was born – screaming, presumably – into a world that he would later pick apart with surgical precision and reassemble into some of the most mind-meltingly bizarre narratives human civilization has had the gall to produce.  Kafka was a wiry stream of dread and genius poured into a human-shaped container.  He was the literary badass who saw modern life for what it really is – bureaucratic purgatory with a side of existential horror.

Yes, Franz Kafka, the grim architect of worlds where people turn into cockroaches and face endless surreal trials without any clear crime or resolution.  He’s the guy who somehow managed to make even paperwork feel like a metaphysical death spiral.  In “The Metamorphosis,” a dude wakes up as a repulsive insect and everyone he loves despises him – tell me that scene doesn’t feel eerily like the Monday morning commute in emotional metaphor form.  Or take The Trial…a paranoid fever dream where the protagonist gets dragged through the legal ringer without so much as a checklist for survival.  Kafka captured exactly what it feels like to exist inside a system designed to crush you for unclear reasons – on this, the man was, to borrow a modern term, criminally underrated in his time.

But we’re not here to wallow in existential despair (or are we, dear reader?).  No, today we’re popping existentialist champagne – whatever that might look like – and celebrating the incredible influence Kafka has had on literature, philosophy, and probably your last five anxiety spirals.  His writing did something so rare and so raw that most of us puny humans spend entire lifetimes running away from it.  He took the gnawing absurdity of life, the suffocating anxiety of being, and the shallow, ridiculous theater of societal norms and slathered it onto the page with the precision who works for Nightmares, Inc.

This kind of writing lasts for a reason.  Maybe it’s because Kafka was one of us.  He was a guy trapped in the meat grinder of reality (though, in his case, it was working a suffocating insurance job in the shadow of his overbearing father).  Everything was set up to squash him like Gregor Samsa under a boot heal.  But instead, he wrote.  He wrote like there was no tomorrow, because he knew there probably wasn’t, and he filled every paragraph with the nervous, raw quality of someone staring directly into the abyss just long enough for the abyss to nervously shift its gaze elsewhere.

And while the world was busy sleeping on him or dismissing his work as the deranged ramblings of a man who probably just needed a stiff drink and a vacation, Kafka was redefining what fiction could be.  He was one of very few in his time who didn’t tell stories to entertain you in the Saturday matinee sense – he dragged you into a psychological whirlpool and dared you to find your way back.  His influence on modern literature is seared into the DNA of anyone who’s ever tried to capture this mess we call existence into words.  Guys like Borges, Camus, and Pynchon…the whole brood of postmodern and existential heavy-hitters owe him a stack of royalties and an apology note scrawled in shaky handwriting.

Did Kafka mean to be this towering figure of angst-riddled brilliance?  Hardly.  The man didn’t even want most of his stuff published.  He told his buddy Max Brod to burn the manuscripts after his death.  Thank God Max ignored the instructions like a responsible literary saboteur.  Because what’s life without Kafka?  Cleaner, maybe.  Simpler, definitely.  But infinitely less true.

And so, as we raise a glass – probably of something unreasonably dark and bitter, because what else would Kafka himself toast with? – we thank him for putting the absurdity of life into a terrifyingly honest mirror.  Happy Birthday, Uncle Franz.  You taught us all that the world is laughing at us, sure…but sometimes, it’s okay to laugh back.

Now go read The Metamorphosis again.  It’s a party.

N.P.: “Going to the Party” – The Allergies, Lyrics Born

Today, dear reader, we pour some out for Ernest Hemingway.  For a name that thunders with such literary gravitas, it’s paradoxical how much of him has been sliced, boiled, and reduced into a series of cliches fed to college freshmen in Intro to Lit.  Hemmingway, the masculine deity of the English sentence, I’m told, lived as though his life were a dare he accepted solely to spite death.  And how did it end?  Death, of course.  Death, in all its clinical indifference, finally called his bluff.  On July 2, 1961, Hemingway shoved two rounds of buckshot into himself in Ketchum, Idaho.  Cue the symphony of gasps, tributes, and reductive eulogies, all neatly packaged for obligatory reverence.  Yet the man, much like the sentences he crafted, wasn’t so easily punctuated.

To get into the meat of Hemingway’s life – this messy, blood-soaked symphony of adventure, genius, and catastrophe – you first have to understand the gravitational force he exerted not just on American literature, but on our entire mythology of what it means to live wildly and write well.  You can’t talk about courage in prose without tipping your hat to the guy who turned language into a knife.  Hemingway wrote as if words had weight – every sentence carved lean, shorn of excess, held up by something primal.  The Old Man and the Sea was a proving ground of grit.  A Farewell to Arms was love set against the erosion of humanity.  He forced readers into the ring with life’s hard knocks, and somehow, we loved him for it.  But there’s an odd hypocrisy in the Hemingway myth.  For all his talk of stoic restraint and quiet courage, his life was a chaos of loud, brazen excess.  This was a guy who chased bulls in Spain, downed daiquiris on the daily in Cuba, and hunted big game as if extinction lists didn’t exist.  Hemingway didn’t just live…he swaggered.  He tore through the trenches of World War I, bled out Hemoglobin’s worth of whiskey, and somehow still had the energy to swear loudly at the inadequacies of hotel service.  It was as if he lived on the belief that to stare death in the face was not enough – you had to step closer until you felt it’s breath.

And yet, the end loomed.  Because genius burns fast, and gods of excess always leave behind a smoldering wreckage.  By the late 1950s, Hemingway’s life turned into its own tragic third act.  Wracked by injuries from plane crashes, riddled with lingering effects of old wounds, and plagued by the ghosts of too many memories – his resilience began to crack.  Depression crept in, and paranoia turned the world into a series of looming shadows.  There’s a particularly cruel irony in knowing how a man who prided himself on the clarity of language underwent electroshock therapy – treatment that dulled not only his memories, but his creative fire.  He who gave the world such piercing prose began to lose his edge, stumbling toward a haze of confusion and pain.

And so when that July morning arrived, it didn’t exactly whisper.  Hemingway closed the book on his own narrative in the way he had always seemed destined to – not quietly, not cutely, but violently definitive.

The lesson I’ve taken from his work, mostly, is something like this: courage is not the absence of fear but the grit to stand firm within its shadow.

He was not a saint.  He was flawed, and sometimes brutal.  But that’s also the point.  Hemingway didn’t live or write to be worshiped.  He did it because he couldn’t do otherwise, and from that compulsiveness sprang something rare, magnetic, and alive.
I think Hemingway would laugh at all the efforts to tidy the loose ends of his story and life.  Because he, of all people, knew there was no clean narrative.  Just the raw beauty of life lived, fought for, and sometimes lost.

N.P.: “Sunroof Diesel Blues” – MY BABY